Cody Russell

Photos

I’ve been asked to put the photos of VLA THE IMPALER back online, so I’ve done so. I’ve got a few new photos of VLA along with the new Thomachot bow that I’ll try to put on there sometime soon.

The photos and impaler webpages are still using the old HTML code from my old website. I’ll get that stuff updated as soon as I can. I’m sort of preoccupied with work, preparing for an audition, and trying to deal with interviews and stuff. I’ve got another Google interview coming up sometime soon!

People moving around

Gerry and Shannon have now moved out to Midland, TX. Shannon has a good job as a pastor, or a minister, or whatever it’s called in her church, at some church in Midland. Gerry got a job at another law firm out there now, and seems to be enjoying it much more than the one in Dallas. It sounds like a much better working situation, and it sounds like they have much better hours. I can totally understand wanting to get a job somewhere with people who have lives and want to live them, so I’m glad he is working there now.

Lesley got a job teaching and playing out in El Paso, TX. It seems like sort of an unlikely place, but Ben lives there now and he likes it and Lesley said she likes it too. Maybe sometime I’ll take a trip out to west Texas to visit Gerry and then Lesley. That would be possibly a cool trip. I don’t think I’ve ever really been to west Texas.

Practice

Sometimes it’s going really well, and sometimes it’s not going so well. It’s just inconsistent.

I’ve been slowly working through the Hindemith Op.11/5 solo sonata. Damn that thing is freaking hard. But it’s quickly becoming my favorite of the solo sonatas. I also really like the 1937 sonata. Part of my interest may be because almost nobody ever plays these two sonatas for some reason. Everyone plays Op.25/1, and for some reason everybody seems to want to try to play Op.31/4. I used to want to play Op.31/4 when I was in high school and early college (although it was way, way, way out of my league), but now I have absolutely no interest in that sonata anymore. I think the second movement is nice, but the first movement is very difficult (especially if you play a large viola) because of all the unison notes, and ultimately it just sounds like an etude. In fact, the last movement almost always ends up sounding like an etude as well, only it’s all in octaves. Even if you can manage to make it sound halfway decent, you’re never going to find an audience of anyone but violists who give a shit about that stupid sonata. Even Hindemith abandoned it after only a few performances, although he did so for the wrong reason I think. My understanding was that he quit using it because it was too hard; he should have quit using it because it just isn’t interesting to listen to.

Fortunately, Op.11/5 does not suffer from the same problems. It’s really difficult (and in a lot of ways, I would argue, it is much more difficult than Op.31/4), but it has a lot of musical value in it I think. You could easily find an audience who would appreciate a good performance of that sonata. The trick will just be learning it well enough to pull off a good performance.

Photos

I’m making an attempt to get photos back onto the website. There are still some broken links that will get fixed soon. At some point while I was swapping some hardware around, I left a lot of the photos on a hard drive that isn’t in my machine so I don’t have really easy access to those yet.

Work

So boring. I find nothing about the company or the product in the least bit interesting, and since they don’t like me working on free software on my own time then I’ve sort of come to not enjoy programming or computer stuff at all anymore. The company is like 85-90% of the reason for that, and the other 10-15% goes to a really cool place that said they wanted to hire me and then changed their minds. I never found out what the story was with that, but it was sort of upsetting because the guys there were really cool and it was a great place.

I got offered a job in New York, but I turned it down. Partly because I was waiting for the above mentioned place to make their official offer, and partly because after doing some more research on the place in New York it turned out they write spyware. How do I know they write spyware?

• When a company’s website FAQ has a section saying why their software isn’t spyware, that’s a good indication that it is.
• I found a copy of their software on my own Windows partition (both at home and at work), and I know I never willingly installed it.

The cool thing was that it was in New York, and that’s a great place. Carolyn is in New York now too, but there’s no telling for how long.